RIM’s BlackBerrys are known as many things but have not been generally thought of as entertainment devices. Well that hasn’t stopped Hunter Point Ventures, a shell company, from suing RIM for infringing a patent for a music playlist.
A complaint was filed in Wisconsin, and Seattle-based Hunter Point Ventures claims that RIM’s handsets violate its “method for musical playlist selection in a portable audio device.” The “invention” in question is US Patent 7667123. Executives at a company called Interactive Objects applied for the patent in 2001, and have since transferred it to the shell company.
Here is an excerpt from the patent:
A portable audio playing device implements a jukebox manager function to permit the simple generation of musical playlists and the alteration or editing of existing playlists. Data, such as MPEG-3 data or other conventional audio format data, may be readily downloaded into the system for storage in a solid state memory or in a spinning media device. The audio tracks are associated with one or more metatags that are used to describe the content of each track. The metatags and associated audio tracks are stored in a data structure that may be implemented as a database or other convenient data structure that readily permits searching by user-specified search terms. The user generates a new playlist by selecting one or more metatags corresponding to the desired musical tracks. The system queries the data structure using the userspecified metatags and automatically generates a playlist containing one or more audio tracks whose metatags correspond to the user-specified metatags. Alternatively, the system may perform the same query and simply generate a results list that will allow the user to manually specify which of the audio tracks identified by the search process will be added to the newly created playlist. The system also permits the simple editing of existing playlists. New audio tracks may be added in the manner described above using metatags for searching or maybe manually added from the list of stored audio tracks. The system readily supports different audio formats and different playlist types.
Playlists as we know, allow users to create a personal list of songs, and are common features of smart phones and generally every music player. Last year, a different shell company used another playlist patent to sue Apple and Amazon.
In recent years, there seems to have been a rise in shell companies that don’t actually make anything but sue companies that do, a practice known as trolling.
Source: GigaOM